Realtime server status page - slow on refresh

I'm new to perl. And I studied it because I really need to use CGI on my project. I have a website which pings my 10 VMware servers, now I display the status of the servers on a webpage. (online or offline) ..I use autorefresh on the page but it loads too long.

1.) Is there anyway to resolve this? Is there anyway that I can just loop the ping commands and not refresh the whole page?

2.) through the site, also I want to run a bat file on my webserver. The bat file will open or close my VMware servers. Is this possible?

Any comments/suggestions is very much appreciated. Thanks much.. =)

re: Realtime server status page - slow on refresh

How or where does perl come into the problem? You mention CGI, but that is not perl. How are you currently pinging your servers?

re: Realtime server status page - slow on refresh

I studied CGI because I need to run a remote file, and most common tutorials in CGI used perl programming.. So I practiced some perl and used it to ping my servers. Specifically, Net::Ping.. Here is my code.

use Net::Ping;

my $ip1 = 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx';
my $p = Net::Ping->new();
print "Server Online\n"
if $p->ping($ip1);
$p->close();
print "Server Offline\n"
unless $p->ping($ip1);
$p->close();

It works for me but I'm not really sure if I'm doing it right. I'm still a beginner with perl. Another is running a remote file. Is there a way to do that in perl? Thanks again.

re: Realtime server status page - slow on refresh

The pinging looks OK to me. As far as running a remote file goes, you can look into stuff like Telnet and SSH, both of which you will find on CPAN in the NET class of modules, just like ping.

re: Realtime server status page - slow on refresh

I understand that this is probably beyond the scope of your experience, but what you have to realize is that pinging a server is a time intensive operation. Especially if you're doing a lot of them, or if even one doesn't respond.

If you want the webpage to be responsive, you're going to have to have to create a separate process that will cache the results of the status checks so that the website only has to display the lastest checked status.

- Miller

re: Realtime server status page - slow on refresh

Hi Guys,
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I made a separate process.
Works a lot better now. Thanks for the help everyone.

re: Realtime server status page - slow on refresh

Kudos. Well done.

- Miller